The blind review process of the abstracts submitted is now complete.
One hundred and sixty three abstracs have been selected, after sifting
through more than twice that number.

It was a very interesting process that proves that the topic of
Changing the Change is present in the design researchers agenda across
all continents. The conference will be a celebration of that interest,
where the best ideas that are being developed internationally will find
a place to be exposed and discussed, with a view to strengthening the
international effort toward a sustainable society.

The organizers of Changing the Change want now to
thank the work of all the reviewers that so generously dedicated their
time, expertise and attention to analyze and select the best abstracts
submitted.

We all look forward now to a great event!

You can leave a reply to Ezio Manzini, Jorge Frascara, Carla Cipollavisiting Changing the Change [BLOG]

Posing Critical Conundrums- the Value of Zebra QuestionsGeetha NarayananFounder Director of Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, India

The Zebra Question is a poem by Shel Silverstein in which he poses the
conundrum of order and causality embedded in our contemporary view or
perspective of life. Is a zebra black with white stripes he asks or is
it white with black stripes? and so on!

Perhaps we might ask, in a similar vein, if it is design and design
thinking that will allow us to build a sustainable and fair world
beyond 2020, or will it be that dominant visions of the world of 2020
will determine the scope, nature and field of what design is today in
the year 2008?

Or perhaps we need to move beyond such simplistic and
reductionist conundrums to some essential and core realizations that
must underpin substantive dialogue on change.

A beginning might be to realize and accept, as David Orr and
others put it, that all education, including design education must
pivot around the human condition, the human prospect and the human
spirit.

An addition to this would be the realization that the human
condition, prospect and spirit is linked closely to our home -our
mother ship, our Gaia, our earth. The earth defines the material, the
matter that forms the fundamental core of our existence. It plays a big
role in defining both the human condition and the human prospect.

A third realization could be centered around the understanding that
contemporary discourses on matter such as the ones on sustainability,
slowness or on change omit a vital part of what makes each of us human-
our spirit-that which endures beyond matter and is what defines each of
us as living beings on this planet- described by Carl Sagan as "the
pale blue dot".

All of us, who are engaged in being critical about our
societies and our futures, must learn to pose serious and challenging
conundrums around these and other similar critical realizations. Using
the power of the conundrum to generate genuine, equitable and critical
dialogues, ones that do not focus on the generation of a series of
reassuring lies but which deals with "impossible things" and "inconvenient truths" would result in powerful conversations on change.
It will play a vital and informative role, at conferences such as
Changing the Change in generating both the skeptical and the critical
view of design enabled futures.

The Changing the Change conference offers an opportunity to question
dominant paradigms in design, including contemporary paradigms such as
sustainability thinking and green design. There is a real need today
for designers, educators and thinkers to question the idea of
development, not in isolation but together with notions of equity, of
social and environmental justice and in doing this consider carefully
the needs of both the people and the planet.

To me that would imply Changing the Change!

You can leave a reply to Geetha Narayananvisiting Changing the Change [BLOG]

Changing the change: a perspective from business strategy Roberto Verganti Politecnico di Milano and Harvard Business School

One of the most acknowledged (and so far unquestioned) theories of business is that competition is based on distinctive capabilities:
something that one organization has and others haven't. For years this
theory has been the basis for contending the value of design for
business: design makes a difference. And this approach of justifying
the value of design because of differentiation has succeeded indeed.
The number of companies investing on design is soaring.
Good news? Definitely. Surely for students and professionals, with an
increasing demand for design skills and services. But unfortunately
there is a downside: as an asset diffuses to every company, it
inevitably loses its differential power. It becomes mandatory, not
distinctive. It happened 20 years ago with Total Quality Management. In
the late '80s firms considered quality as a top priority; the best
quality performers were succeeding, and other companies started to
invest in quality improvements with similar models and approaches: each
adopted the principles of Total Quality Management, each had a manager
responsible for Quality, each adopted six sigma or control charts. Two
decades later quality is not among the top corporate priorities
anymore. It is mandatory of course, and there are still quality
managers in each firm, but quality is not considered a strategic
differentiator. Is design bound to a similar destiny in business: to be
mandatory, but not strategic?

I know this claim could sound awkward and outlandish to many. No one
would nowadays dare to claim that design is marginal for business and
competition. But as all companies around the globe are investing in
design, and as all are investing in a similar way (all adopting user
centered processes and techniques such as ethnographic analysis,
brainstorming, rapid experimentation cycles) design in the next future
is at risk to be perceived by managers as something necessary, but not
differential. Design researchers, who have the attitude and the duty to
look forward, have something to think and worry about. What's next?
The rationale of the CtC conference comes from observation of the
challenges that are faced by society and its implications for design
researchers. Our discussion above points out that there is an
additional reason for changing the way we have been thinking about
design. A reason that is pragmatically rooted in the dynamics of
competition and of strategy. Also businesses will be shortly looking
for a radical change in their processes of change. Design needs to
propose a new paradigm if it wants to stay high in the agenda.

You can leave a reply to Roberto Vergantivisiting Changing the Change [BLOG]

Well known for their iconoclastic power, they were recognized as major
driver of linguistic change in the arts and in architecture.
They also had the stronger, although less direct, role of anticipating and catalyzing major socio-cultural and political change.
In design and architecture, it was their ability to "give shape" to
change that allowed them to have a revolutionary role comparable, if
not larger, to the one of "true" politicians.

At the end of the last century, the independent exploration of
designers grew inside large companies, and took a different format,
combining the scenarios of a future life with a potential vision for
the whole company and its strategy. In this case, the culture that
designers try to change is both the external one, the user culture, and
the internal one, the one of the company.

Today, the role of Design Research, or Strategic Design, is
giving to designers in a company the responsibility to represent the
transformation of the world "Out There" and bringing it inside the
company. Among the many "sensors" that a company tries to develop to
get in touch with its users, Strategic Design is the one that has the
most visionary role: rather than asking users what they may like in the
future, Strategic Design needs to imagine the future before taking it
in front of users. Designers in this case need to be involved in a sort
of mutual "seduction" with their audience: designers need to be "seduced" by the desire for change that people is about to express, but
they also need at the same time to create visions that are so exciting,
tangible and plausible that can catalyze this desire for change and
spin it into demand for new products and services.
To be so concrete and credible, designers cannot just rely on ideas or
concepts. They need to develop a new aesthetic, an innovative language
that can at a time render anything past obsolete and uninteresting, and
open new iconic references for the future.
In this sense, visionary designers today wouldn't be much different
from the "constructive iconoclasts" of the original avant-gardes. They
just work in an environment much more integrated in their company.
But there is another dimension that makes this job today way more
complex that in the past: the eco-system dimension. Eco-systematic
approaches are not only limited to environmental eco-systems: it seems
that any major innovation today needs to face the complexity of large
systems that no designer, or even no single company, can control. Any
innovation in digital communication, for example, such as social
networking or mobile communication, touches multiple points of contact
with the user and multiple networked systems that support them. In the
same way, an innovation in manufacturing, like a new material or
manufacturing cycle, touches many globally sparse components and
suppliers.
Under these circumstances, any design vision needs to be supported by a
certain degree of feasibility that spans across the whole ecosystem,
which translates in the opportunity to steer the whole ecosystem toward
a better balance.
And this is what makes visionary design today so exciting and
important: never before the culture of design has been so strategically
necessary (for companies), so socially relevant (for the users), so
impactful (for entire ecosystems) and so communicative (of new
aesthetics). It has also probably never been as difficult before, but
this challenge is what makes it even more interesting.

You can leave a reply to Marco Susanivisiting Changing the Change [BLOG]